“Music has an ugly side,” US singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle (1982-2020) once wrote in his journal, “and it is the business.” What Do You Do When You’re Lonesome: The Authorised Biography of Justin Townes Earle (Hachette, £25) by Jonathan Bernstein, is as much a cautionary story of how the music industry can bleed a musician dry as an exploration of sobriety and addiction, an uneasy, rootless son-father relationship (his father is songwriter Steve Earle), and the creative, some might say mythical, lore of Nashville.
Bernstein is a senior research editor for Rolling Stone, and so his skills at locating central issues are expected; what isn’t is how he manages to deftly separate Earle from the people who influenced him the most. Exclusive and authorised access to journals, unpublished lyrics, unreleased music, family (except Earle snr, who declined to be interviewed) and close friends, as well as old-fashioned journalistic digging, unearth a wealth of detail about a young musician who, perhaps, had too many odds stacked against him.
Forced to tour continuously to make money (the rise of music streaming radically reduced sales of his CDs), life on the road was the rod that broke his back and the rot that infected his soul. The resulting story is a heartbreaker, told with nuance, compassion and depth.
Not so much heartbreaking as heavy lifting, Love Magic Power Danger Bliss: Yoko Ono and the Avant-Garde Diaspora (Faber, £25) by Paul Morley is an intense, thorough overview of the first avant-garde artist who, thanks to her marriage to John Lennon, became a household name from the late ‘60s onwards. Unlike some of the prolific author’s previous biographies, this digs deeply and coherently into the subject’s personal history, much of which was new to this reader.
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Certainly, Yoko Ono’s early life and conceptual/interactive artwork make for fascinating reading. Also, despite Morley’s by now tiresome signature expressive repetition (why use three words to describe the same thing when Roget’s Thesaurus gives you 30?), there’s an authentic understanding of an artist who dropped out of a private liberal arts institute, Sarah Lawrence College, in New York state, because she felt smothered by conventional tutors. Crucially, and to give Morley due credit, Lennon appears only in the book’s closing pages. This neatly links Ono’s art (perceptively described here as “visual haiku”) with avant-garde pioneers John Cage and Karl Stockhausen, and the sonic explorations of the Beatles producer George Martin.
Perhaps the first sign of the mop-tops’ untutored genius was their appearance in their first film. Credited as being one of the best ever music-related films, and its director, Richard Lester, as the authentic originator of modern music videos, that 1964 film receives the British Film Institute’s imprimatur as a classic work of cinema via A Hard Day’s Night (Bloomsbury BFI Film Classics, £11.69) by Samira Ahmed. It’s a slim book (128pp), but the award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster covers it all, from the making of the film to its reception, influence and legacy.
What raises the book above the norm is Ahmed’s female perspective, particularly in Chapter 4: Women in A Hard Day’s Night. If the film captures, she writes, “the peak of the band’s teen girl appeal, it also documents something more complex that was beginning to be reflected in the increasingly mature themes of their songwriting… independent career women who might not be at the beck and call of their boyfriends".
Such insights are smartly delivered in a brilliantly researched book that could be read within an hour or two (stills from the film are filtered throughout) and which match perfectly what Lester intended to convey: “That the Beatles were turning the world of popular culture and entertainment upside down.”
Sticking with film and music, The Evolution of American Film Music, 1960s-1990s (MacFarlane Books, £29.99) by Wayne Byrne and Amanda Kramer, charts the use of music in film during the period of what the co-authors describe as the most radical, when “the counterculture phenomenon and socio-political atmosphere of 1960s America led to anti-establishment shifts within the artistic industries of film, music, literature, and more”.
A pivotal harbinger of change was A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, directed by Elia Kazan), which was the first film to use jazz music, composed by Alex North, for its entire score. The narrative outline is linear, taking us from the likes of I Want to Live! (1958, director Robert Wise), and Anatomy of a Murder (1959, Otto Preminger) to Easy Rider (1969, Dennis Hopper), A Clockwork Orange (1971, Stanley Kubrick), and Shaft (1971, Gordon Parks), and directors such as David Lynch and Spike Lee.
Interesting points highlighted include why certain music acts refuse permission for their music to be used (for example, This Mortal Coil nixing their version of Song to the Siren for John Hughes’ 1988 romcom weepie, She’s Having a Baby), the role of music supervisors, and how auteurs and autodidacts directly alter industry methodologies.
Take an empathetic, inquisitive interviewer and a responsive, articulate interviewee, and you have a dialogue that, all going well, should explain exactly what makes the respondent tick. A more informed discussion ensues when there is trust, but that can only truly be the case when more than one conversation takes place. That level of faith is apparent throughout Cognitive Dissident: Conversations with The The’s Matt Johnson, by Jason Wood and Matt Johnson (Omnibus Press, £25), which collects six years of thorough discourse. Structured in Q&A style, British Film Institute director Jason Wood covers every aspect of Johnson’s life, from his east London childhood, his teenage years, the influence of post-punk on his music, the rollercoaster ride of music industry successes and failures, and his grief-stricken retreat from music and subsequent return.
There is a lot to take in across almost 500 pages, but the Q&A format cuts to the chase, allowing Johnson to answer (often at length) without interruption. One for committed The The fans? Probably, but anyone interested in considered thinking from an uncompromising artist should also dive in.
